Michelle Tokarczyk, Class Definitions: On the Lives and Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison (Susquehanna University Press)
by Michele Fazio, English, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Too often, American working-class literature has been dominated by literary texts depicting the 1930s. One need only think of Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1938), Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace (1940), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) to recognize the ways in which working-class culture has been predominantly characterized by the demands of physical labor and sacrifice brought about by the proletarian era. But working-class literature, as Janet Zandy and Nicholas Coles point out in American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (2007), has always been a part of the American experience from colonial society up to the present.
Michelle Tokarczyk’s Class Definitions builds upon this notion by expanding the identification of working-class literature beyond cultural and temporal borders that relegate the study of class to the past. Tokarczyk’s study explores the complexities of class in contemporary women’s literature and redirects our focus from the public sphere of work to the private world of home, offering a penetrating look at the inescapable effects class oppression has on family life and identity formation.
Arguing that class is not singly defined, Tokarczyk examines the multidimensional aspects of working-class culture and compares three well-known, critically acclaimed contemporary American authors: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Dorothy Allison. Despite their different ethnic and regional backgrounds (Chinese-American, Mexican-American, and Southern respectively), Tokarczyk draws upon the authors’ similarities—and how their autobiographical fiction represents the diverse experience of working-class women. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984), and Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) are not nostalgic narratives. Instead, they realistically depict the female protagonists’ struggle to achieve selfhood. The world of home, Tokarczyk explains, is a composite of competing aspects, which shade and color individuality and group identity. Tokarczyk’s analysis shows the ways in which Kingston, Cisneros, and Allison are committed to using the act of writing as a source of healing, reconnecting to and reclaiming working-class experience as central to their personal and professional lives.
Tokarczyk identifies the writers’ focus on “communities” as moving beyond the individualistic nature of autobiography (typically male) to encompass the genre of “life writing” (31). The self-reflexive nature of life writing underscores the conflicts women, especially ethnic and working-class women, face in negotiating public and private spaces. The performativity of these works, Tokarczyk claims, is essential to recognizing how working-class literature is representative of and a product of experience. Operating from this premise, Tokarczyk devotes three chapters to situating Kingston, Cisneros, and Allison within working-class theory, offering both close readings of their works and important biographical detail that contextualizes each author’s struggles and motivations as a writer.
Among the book’s strengths is its breadth of analysis in covering many of the writers’ most recent works and the inclusion of personal interviews she conducted with each author. She lets the writers speak for themselves and offers yet another layer for readers to recognize how class informs their work. The discussions in the interviews range from war and spirituality to sexuality and the exploitation of adjunct instructors, and add significantly to the preceding chapters.
Class Definitions answers the long overdue call for placing class at the center of intersectional analysis in literary studies and creates a bridge between the fields of women and ethnic studies. Tokarczyk reminds her audience of how the lens of class enriches an understanding of writers whose work expresses what she calls “an ethnic and working-class postmodernism” (118). Innovative and timely, accessible and useful, Class Definitions critically examines the many representations of American working-class culture and signals new directions in the field of working-class studies.
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Renny Christopher, A Carpenter’s Daughter: A Working-Class Woman in Higher Education (Sense Publishers)
by Christie Launius, Director of Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
A Carpenter’s Daughter is a memoir of Renny Christopher’s life, from childhood to the present day, with a particular focus on her formal and informal education. It is full of personal memories and painful self-realizations, many of which are drawn directly from saved journals, but it is also an analytical narrative, as Christopher takes those memories and experiences and reads them through the lens of the work of Jean Anyon, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, Richard Rodriguez, Lillian Rubin, and Barbara Jensen, among others. Furthermore, the reader gets to see how Christopher was galvanized by her early experiences in academia to become a crucial part of growing and nurturing the very field of Working-Class Studies.
An entire shelf of my bookcase is taken up with narratives written by those who moved out of the working class and into the middle class via higher education. Christopher’s book is the latest addition to my collection, and in many ways it takes its place comfortably among those already there. By that I mean that Christopher’s story, in its broad outlines, will be familiar to others who have taken the same journey, as well as to those who have read any of the fine anthologies written by academics from working-class backgrounds.
Overwhelmingly, narratives such as these show that home and school are completely different worlds for working-class students, and that those worlds are not just different but often in conflict with one another in ways that cause cognitive dissonance and distress to the student moving back and forth between them. Christopher, like many others, writes of feeling nowhere at home, comfortable neither in the working-class family and community into which she was born, nor in the middle-class world of academia.
But for all the thematic similarities between Christopher’s narrative and others in this genre, in some very important ways Christopher’s book does not rest easily alongside those works. This is because she dares to assert, in print, that maybe her pursuit of higher education and her subsequent move into the middle class was not worth it after all. She writes that hers “is not a happy story of upward mobility, or a realization of the American Dream ghost-written by Horatio Alger. It is, instead, the transcription of a nightmare; a nightmare about movement, but not meaningful movement” (xiii).
Of her decision to pursue a Ph.D. she writes that even now, almost two decades after finishing graduate school, “I am about 50% glad I did it, and about 50% sorry” (74). This refusal to unequivocally say that it was worth it, despite the pain and loss, seems connected to the severity of her self-criticisms, which are at times painful to read. She excoriates her younger self for having internalized the belief that she was better than those she was leaving behind, for having wanted and needed the affirmation of her middle-class teachers, for selling out, for not having been more resistant and rebellious.
In the end, though, she makes a kind of peace with herself and the world, finding value in her work. Still, she writes “I refuse to celebrate my life as a success, as any sort of triumph or overcoming, because the society of inequality in which I have lived it does not allow me to take any joy in what I have done. . . But I do acknowledge that I have survived” (179). All in all, Christopher moves this genre forward, and it is my hope that others will not only find affirmation here (one of her stated aims in writing the volume), but also be inspired to follow suit.
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Liesl Orenic, On the Ground: Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry (U. of Illinois)
by Lou Martin, History, Chatham University
While recent histories of the airline industry have explored the work and labor relations of flight attendants and pilots, Liesl Miller Orenic examines less glamorous airline workers in her book On the Ground: Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry. In doing so Orenic provides an “alternative narrative to the myth of labor complacency after World War II,” telling the story of baggage handlers and others at four major airlines from the 1930s through the 1960s. (2) These workers were surprisingly influential in shaping the industry as they won “middle-class” lives for themselves.
Beginning in the early 1930s, airline workers were forced to join several different unions under the watchful eye of federal regulators who placed them under the Railway Labor Act. This law effectively prohibited industrial unionism, stipulating that workers should form bargaining units by class and craft. Orenic takes great pains to untangle the overlapping organizing drives among different crafts at four companies in locations across the country. The 1940s witnessed numerous jurisdictional disputes between the International Association of Machinists (IAM), the Air Line Mechanics Association, the Transport Workers Union (TWU), and others. But by the 1950s, airline workers had sorted through their various differences and were “whipsawing” their way to better wages and benefits through numerous strikes and other displays of power.
In 1965, five airlines and the IAM agreed to multi-carrier negotiations while President Lyndon Johnson set a 3.2 percent wage guideline to fight inflation. Negotiations dragged on until the IAM called a strike in July 1966. The union refused to accept offers negotiated by a Presidential Emergency Board as Congress threatened anti-union legislation to keep airlines running smoothly at a time of war. LBJ stalled Congress fearing the backlash from labor. Union leaders counseled members to accept a new compromise negotiated by the President himself, but the rank and file refused. Airline workers were at the height of their power and won a 6 percent increase that undermined the wage guidelines and set a benchmark for workers in other industries.
Orenic hopes to provide “an important glimpse at the postwar working class” as baggage handlers worked in the service sector, lived in suburbs and were, thus, “emblematic” of the era. (2) One chapter does a superb job of describing the work culture of baggage handlers in the 1950s and 1960s, but institutions—unions, companies, and federal agencies—dominate the rest of the book. Making such a complex, sprawling history intelligible is a laudable achievement.
On the Ground adds to our understanding of postwar labor history by examining how unskilled workers achieved and maintained a comfortable standard of living through collective bargaining closely supervised by the state. The story of how airline workers reached a point by 1966 that they could stay on the picket lines while Congress gnashed its teeth and the President squirmed is an important one. Labor historians have closely studied the many failings of and injustices committed by unions at the height of their power. Tracing labor’s path to power in the 1950s and 1960s and understanding how millions of workers’ achieved lives of comfort and dignity are equally important projects.